Breaking Storytelling Down, A to Z

When I first learned about storytelling a quarter century ago, I figured, "Well, I'll learn some stories, and if I tell them, I'll be a storyteller."

Yes and no. True, anyone can tell a story. But storytelling is an art, and to develop that art, you not only need practice, but an awareness of many elements that make up the storytelling process and go into performance.

Over at True Stories, Honest Lies, storyteller Laura Packer spent the month of May blogging about the art and craft of storytelling in an alphabetical fashion, from A to Z. (Darn it, why didn't I think of that first?)

Laura's observations are always thoughtful, so if you're interested in the art of storytelling (as a storyteller or as a fan of the art form), her posts are worth a read:

Rather than list 26 links here, I'll point you to her summary pages:
index for A through E
index for F through J
index for K through P
index for Q through Z

Not only do I enjoy Laura's writing, but there are a couple of posts that I'm still thinking about with regards to issues that I need to improve in my own work.

My favorite? F is for Fun.

Shout Out: “Bawdy Storytelling” Turns Six

 

Blythe Baldwin tells a story
at Bawdy's Sixth Anniversary Show
Photo credit: Queerly Yours

  As I walked into San Francisco’s Verdi Club on a recent Saturday night, every single one of the 300 seats in the venue was full; it was standing room only for a night of storytelling.    There was an excited buzz in the air, helped along by a live DJ and the Club’s full bar. If you had been there, you would certainly have recognized the familiar conventions of a traditional storytelling event: the friendly emcee with a Southern accent welcoming “y’all,” an opening song referencing several fairy tale characters; and then the stories on stage: a story about dealing with parents; a story about a challenging first day on the job; a memoir of a journey to self-discovery, love, and family; and a tale of “how we first met.”

  The fact that Swedish public television had a camera crew to cover this event might have been your first clue that this would not be your ordinary night of true stories.  

  The second clue might be in the details: those stories I mentioned about parents, work, love and meeting also happen to involve, respectively: a gynecological exam, prostitution, transsexuality, and animal role play and fetishism. 

  And that was just the first half of the show.

  Welcome to Bawdy Storytelling, the nation’s original live storytelling series featuring true stories about human sexuality. 

      Dixie De La Tour, the show’s producer, founder, and emcee, started Bawdy Storytelling six years ago. It was originally an informal story swap, a coffee klatsch for her friends in San Francisco’s vibrant sex-positive community.

  But as audience interest from others grew, “I started curating the storytellers,” says De La Tour. “I could get more people to come if they could see in the program that they themselves weren’t on the bill.”  

  As a producer, much of De La Tour’s time is spent recruiting storytellers. Apart from a handful of professional authors, poets, stand-up comics, and storytellers who appear on the Bawdy stage, most of the time she gets ordinary people to tell their stories. There’s no shortage of “real people” in San Francisco who have an interesting sex life. 

Bawdy Storytelling Founder Dixie De La Tour

Photo credit: Queerly Yours

  Once she finds a willing storyteller, then it’s coaching time: De La Tour works with her tellers to hone the story down to its essence, cutting away asides and dead ends, and encouraging her tellers to focus not on a polished monologue that you might hear at The Moth, but on telling as if you were at a party sharing your best story with friends. She has them make a visual map of their story, a story board, to help with structure. Finally, the six tellers featured at a particular event come together for a rehearsal. During the actual show, De La Tour remains onstage with her tellers, to give them support (the tellers might very well be uninhibited when it comes to sexuality, but even the uninhibited can be afraid of public speaking) and to provide a friendly face to tell to (the stage lighting makes it difficult to see the seated audience).

  By and large, the tellers play to a receptive audience. 

  But depending on your comfort level with the subject of sex, the show may not be for you. As an audience member, you will hear intimate details of the performers’ sex lives, told live, in public, with words you may not be accustomed to hearing spoken aloud in public. (The level of profanity varies from teller to teller, but given the subject matter, the language is always colorful and often graphic). The images and situations that come up in the stories can be edgy, even shocking. 

  But the goal of Bawdy has never been titillation. It’s about celebrating sexuality, in all its diversity, through storytelling. (Admittedly, that pitch does not sell as many tickets as the tagline, “The Moth for Pervs,” quoted from an LA Weekly review).

     It’s often the case that audience members might hear about experiences that they may never have conceived were possible. De La Tour likes the idea of expanding people’s perceptions. “My hope is that an audience member may hear about an experience, maybe something they’ve never imagined, and they get interested, and they can go up and talk to that storyteller and find out more.” (Indeed, at the show I attended, I saw several curious audience members at intermission pepper one of the storytellers with questions about the leather-clad “human puppy” that she had on leash that night).

  Mosa Maxwell-Smith, a storyteller and improviser from Oakland, described listening to stories at Bawdy in this way: 

"I can be a very judgemental person. I can't imagine having anything in common with some people when I first meet them, but then I hear their stories and—wow—my mind is blown! I love it when a story shatters my preconceptions and allows me to feel deeply connected to someone I otherwise might not have ever known."

  As for the future of Bawdy, De La Tour continues to recruit storytellers. She has added a “Bawdy Slam” night as a way to encourage more people to share their stories. She’s recently inaugurated a Bawdy series in Los Angeles, and is working on BawdyTalks (TEDTalks for the sex-positive community).  

  I asked Blythe Baldwin, a slam poet and visual artist from San Francisco who has performed at Bawdy many times, to sum up its significance to the community: 

"The importance of Bawdy, as a storyteller and an audience member, is that it offers catharsis in an area that many of us keep secret of out of shame or fear.  When you tell a story, you speak truth to life, and when you own your sexual experiences you own the very thing that makes you human: your wishes, your desires, and your capacity to love. Bawdy brings people together through all of that."

  Learn about upcoming Bawdy Storytelling shows at www.bawdystorytelling.com.